Help! Our Emails are Stuck in Spam Filters! (And How to Get Them Out)

In our Email FAQs series, we answer your email marketing questions! In this episode, Daniel Kohn, the Founder of SmartMail, answers this email marketing question he gets asked all the time by online retailers: Our emails are getting blocked by spam filters. Help! What can we do to avoid this?

Watch the video below to find out what you can do to ensure that your email campaigns reach the inboxes of your shoppers. You can also read the full article or listen to the audio at the bottom of the post.

Hi there, welcome back to “eCommerce Email FAQs.” Today, we’re going to be looking at a question we get asked quite a lot, actually.

The question is, “My emails are already in the spam filter, how do I…just help me. I need help. Help, my emails are in spam.” So, here’s the deal.

Segment Your List Based on Opens and Clicks

One thing that I suggest and is usually very helpful, and I think is, like, the fastest way of getting out of spam filters, is to start to identify and segment out a list or a segment of your list of your openers and clickers.

So, in MailChimp or in, you know, most email tools, it’s really easy to take a segment of people from your list who have opened or clicked in the last two weeks or three months, or at least, three times in the last three months, like frequent openers and frequent clickers.

And what you want to do is just start emailing them for the next couple of weeks. Right, why? Because you’re trying to get your engagement levels back up. Because basically, the way Gmail works is they look at how engaged your list is with your emails.

And if most people aren’t opening or clicking, then, and you keep sending out emails and emails over time, Google are going to go, “You know what, these guys are just not interesting for these people.”

And they basically view the inbox as a piece of real estate, and only the most important emails should get delivered into your inbox. And they’ve got very good mechanisms of really understanding, you know, which emails are more important for each particular person because that’s what makes Google so smart.

That’s what makes their stock, you know, on the market over a thousand dollars, is their algorithms are understanding how to figure that stuff out. Right, so you’re not gonna beat the system.

There’s also a Gmail Postmasters tool that you can sign up for, and you can start to see you’re sending URL, like what quality rating it has with Google.

And over time, you can start to see if it gets better or worse.

So you wanna go to Google Postmasters, I think it is. And that will give you an indication of where you’re sitting on the spectrum of getting in or out of the spam filters.

But that’s the easiest way of avoiding spam. Otherwise, if you’re already in the spam filter, is to really, you know, maybe stop what you’re doing and do like an interrupt.

Change Things Up to Get Out of the Spam Folder

So, if you keep sending the same email template and the same kind of format to your customers… It’s called a “pattern interrupt.”

You wanna interrupt the pattern. You wanna completely change the formatting, the everything, for a bunch of times because the idea is you want to jolt people.

You wanna get people to click. You wanna get people to open.

Change your subject lines, test your subject lines. That’s the other thing that I would do. Because if you can get more people to open, you’re gonna be telling Google, “Hey, more people are more interested.”

And then inside the emails, you know, maybe come up with some crazy promotion or crazy giveaway, specifically for the sake of getting people to click on your emails.

Because if you, for a couple of weeks, can get people to change their pattern and start opening and clicking more or segmenting your list and doing any of those kinds of things or a combination of all of them, you should, and are likely to, sort of get out of that spam filter and that terrible trap that you’re in right now.

But something like this can really be crippling for your entire business.

I mean, it really is terrible if a very big part of your business… And, you know, 30% or 40% of your revenue should really be coming from email marketing.

If 30% or 40% of your business starts to just go into the toilet because you hit the spam filters, you need to do whatever it takes to really get out of that and to be able to start sending more relevant content.

It should be a learning lesson that basically the entire industry and everything focused around the e-commerce industry is heading towards that concept of engagement. So the more you can engage people, the better.

And so that’s basically how I would go about trying to get out of spam filters. I’ve usually seen it work pretty well.

Usually, you wanna sort of email openers and clickers in that segment for a couple of weeks, but once you’ve got Postmasters setup, you should be able to figure out, you know, when you can start opening up that dial again and widening your net to start sending some more people.

But it really is a call as well. It’s like a health check, a health scare. It’s like getting a heart attack, really. I mean, if 30% or 40% of your business is getting affected, like, overnight, it really is kind of like a heart attack.

So have a think about it. Maybe try and implement that. Start sending just to your openers and your clickers, and see how you go. And I hope you’re enjoying these videos. Thanks for watching.